UBLODS OF THE AGE OX COLLEGES. 



SPEECH 



DELIVERED BY THE 



HON. HORACE MANN 



5 I 



i3rcsfticut of ^ntfocl; ColleQc, 



REFOEE THE 



CHRISTIAN CONVENTION, 



A.T ITS QUADKENNIAL SESSION, HELP AT 




/ C I N C I N N xV 



T I , OHIO, 

OCTOBER 5, 1S54. 



Fo^ 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. I 

. [SMITHSONIAN BEPOSIT.] f 

: UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.! 



(lilRS, 



DEMANDS OP THE AGE OX COLLEGES. 



N 



^^7 SPEECH 



deltvebed by the 



HON. HORACE MANN, 



33tesit)fent of ^ntmf^ Collese^ 



BEFORE THE 



CHRISTIAN CONVENTION, 



\ 



AT ITS QXJADEEJTNIAL BBSSIOJf, HELD AT 

CINCINNATI, OHIO, 

OCTOBER 6, 1854. 

Fowler and Wells, Publishers, 

No. 308 BROADWAY. 

. 1857. 






Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 185T, by 

HOEACE MANN, 

In tlie Clerk's Office of the District Court of the United States for the 
Southern District of New York. 



vo < 

\ 



" It is as injurious to the interests of Eeligion, as it is degrading to those 
of Science, when the votaries of either place them in a state of mutual 
antagonism. A mere inference or a theory in Science, however probable, 
must ever give way to a truth revealed; but a scientific truth must be 
maintained, however contradictory it may appear to the most cherished 
doctrines of Eeligion." — Sis David Beewstee. 

" We have heard that the study of Natural Science disposes to Infidel- 
ity. But we feel persuaded that this is a danger only associated with a 
slight and partial, never with a deep and adequate and comprehensive 
view of its principles."— De. Chalmees. 



DEMANDS OF THE AGE ON COLLEGES. 



Mr. President and Gentlemen ; 

Having been requested by my too partial friends 
in this Convention to give you some account of 
Antioch College, — of the principles on which it is 
administered, and the objects at which it aims, — I 
do not feel at liberty to decline compliance. I 
understand that a committee has it in charge to 
make a report upon the material or financial con- 
dition of the College, — the health of its body, so to 
speak, — while I am requested to give some account 
of its spiritual condition, — the health of its Moral 
Sensorium, the seat of Mind and Heart. 

Gentlemen, at your last General Convention, 
held at Marion, four years ago, you decreed the 
existence of Antioch College. By force of that 
decree, and by the blessing of God, that college now 
is^ and you have a right to know all that anybody 
can tell you concerning it. 

Our College is too young to allow me to speak of 
what it has done. It is just one year ago this day, 



Q DEMANDS OF THE AGE 

since, with appropriate ceremonies, it was dedicated 
to the glory of God and the welfare of man ; and, 
by a singular coincidence, I am now called upon, 
precisely one year after having delivered its Dedi- 
catory Address, to speak to you again, — of the 
past, historically ; of the future, I trust, prophet- 
ically. 

Of an institution so recently called into being, 
you can not expect, as you walk through its halls, 
and your footfall wakes a reverberation along its 
galleries, to hear the echoes talk Latin and Greek, 
as is said to be the case with some of the old Univer- 
sities of Europe. You can not expect, as you as- 
cend its lofty towers, or peer into its crypts, to find 
any old Genius of the Mathematics sitting there and 
working out the deep problems which are hereafter 
to enlighten the world. We are too young for any 
such apparitions, real or fabulous. 

To-day, then, is the first birthday of Antioch 
College. That Institution was opened under cir- 
cumstances most embarrassing to Faculty and Stu- 
dents. I am about to impute no blame to any 
one; but I must give a glimpse of our early his- 
tory. On coming to Antioch College, in October 
last, we found nothing in readiness but our own 
hearts. The weather was cold, but there was not 
a fireplace nor a stove in the whole establishment. 



ON COLLEGES. ijr 

We had only our love of the cause to keep us 
warm; but this, though very good in Morals, is 
very bad in Physiology. A room had been set 
aparffor a library, but there was not a book in it, 
nor a shelf on which to put one. In vain for that 
had the art of printing been discovered. We had 
not a black-board, nor a school-chair, nor a school- 
desk for any student, nor any habitable school- 
room, or recitation-room. Our first examination, 
for the admission of about two hundred students, 
we were obliged to hold in our dining-hall. We 
cleared off the breakfast dishes from the tables in 
the morning, (for we conduct all our examinations 
for admission in writing,) and when noon came we 
had to clear away pen, ink and paper for dinner ; 
and, after dinner, to clear away the dishes for ex- 
amination again ; so that, at first, over the dining- 
tables of our commons' hall, the cook and the 
professor held divided empire. I doubt whether 
the dining-tables of any college were ever promoted 
to such honor before ; and, for one, I sincerely 
hope they may have borne that honor for the last 
time. The gastronomical and the classical diges- 
tion may well be kept rather more distinct. As 
a literary institution, we certainly have had one 
year of pioneer life ; and our history shows that 
the scholar may have his perils and his exploits, 



g DEMANDS OF THE AGE 

not less than tlie backwoodsman. In fine, if Adam 
and Eve had been brought into this world as 
prematurely as we were brought on to the premises 
of Antioch College, they must have been created 
about Wednesday night ! 

But now we have the nest-egg of a library, to 
which we hope additions will be duly laid ; we 
have a dozen beautiful recitation-rooms ; we have 
the finest school-room I have seen this side of the 
Alleghanies ; we have nearly four hundred stu- 
dents, (a fact, I believe, unprecedented in so young 
an institution ;) and notwithstanding our '' pursuit 
of knowledge under difficulties," I feel bound to 
say that my colleagues and their pupils have done 
a year's most earnest and profitable work. 

" Forsan et hcsc olim meminisse juvabit." 

But, as was remarked before, we are as yet too 
young to show much in the way of performance. 
All that can reasonably be required of us is to tell 
you, not what we have done, but what we are 
striving and preparing to do. 

Let me say, then, in a single sentence, that our 
hope and aim are, to Tneet^ not merely the ad- 
vanced^ hut the advancing Demands of the Age. 
What, then, does the age demand that our College 
should be % or rather, in the first place, what does 



ON COLLEGES. 9 

the age demand that it should not be ? It should 
not be an Egyptian pyramid, for the preservation 
of old mummies, literary or psychological. What- 
ever has vitality in it ; whatever has truth in it, 
these let us religiously preserve ; for Truth is en- 
dued with immortal youth and beauty, and can 
give forever and to all, without self-exhaustion or 
impoverishment. But as for the mummies of the 
pyramids, let the Arab peasants continue to burn 
them, as travellers tell us they are now accustomed 
to do, for cooking their dinners. Would to Heaven 
that all the tyrants of the present day, political and 
mental, could be put to as good a use. 

Dugald Stewart likens some of the literary insti- 
tutions of his time to old hulks» sunk in the stream, 
which, by their stationary position, show to the 
passers-by how far the living have advanced be- 
yond the dead on the River of Progress. We do 
not desire to enter into any competition with those 
old hulks for the honor or the repose of their con- 
servatism. Among the moral surveyors who are 
measuring the onward march of mankind, we would 
aspire to be found among the foremost chain- 
bearers, pressing right forward, in defiance of any 
obstacle and up any acclivity ; and let those who 
come after keep the tally. We loathe to be classed 
among the fossil remains of by-gone ages ; as be- 



JO DEMAITDS OF THE AGE 

longing to that order of men who, if they had been 
born during an eclipse of the sun, would have pro- 
tested against the return of its light ; or, if they 
had been born in the ark, during the deluge of 
Noah, would have remonstrated against the subsi- 
dence of the waters. The new moon waxes to its 
fulness during the first part of the night, when the 
world is awake to gaze at the beauty of its orbing ; 
the old moon wanes into darkness during the last 
part of the night, when the world is asleep ; as 
though it were a little ashamed of an appearance 
which only seems to be retrograde.* 

But what are the advanced and advancing wa,nts 
of the age, which we acknowledge an ambition to 
answer ? I can, of course, within the limits which 
I ought not here to transgress, give only the brief- 
est reply to so comprehensive a question. 

In the first place, I think that those of us who 
are graduates of a college, on looking back to the 
condition in which we were left on our graduation- 
day, must all agree, and all lament, that we suf- 
fered under a great deficiency, or, rather, a great 

* Thougli we would conserve every thing which is noble, and 
exalted, and Christ-like, yet we are not so in love with con- 
servatism that we would, as some do, value every old mummy " 
according to its first cost, with compound interest to the 
present time. 



ON COLLEGES. ]^]^ 

calamity, in regard to jpersonal manners. How- 
ever impoi^sible it may be to define the difference, 
yet everybody knows that an immense difference 
does exist between a gentleman and a clown. Now, 
to whatever bachelorship or mastership of arts our 
old college diplomas may have certified, they cer- 
tainly did not certify to, they certainly did not imply 
any mastership of the art of polite, easy, graceful, 
self-possessed manners which would serve us as a let- 
ter of introduction on our entrance into the world. 
Our Alma Mater, — our fostering mother, as she is 
called, — did not foster in us an open, frank, manly, 
independent, yet modest bearing, — a quick con- 
sciousness of our position, whatever it might be, 
and a prompt, practical perception of the pro- 
prieties that belonged to it. Now, this outward 
stamp and superscription of a gentleman is equally 
distant from awkwardness, on the one hand, and 
conventionalism on the other. The awkward man, 
from his practical ignorance of the manners of 
educated ' society, is so puzzled to think how he 
shall behave, that he can not behave at all ; or, 
rather, his arms, legs, head, and tongue all behave 
at random. On the other hand, the man whose 
limbs and faculties have all been dried and skew- 
ered by conventionalism, always governs himself 
by some arbitrary rule, and never by that fitting 



12 DEMANDS OF THE AGE 

propriety which is born of the occasion ; and hence^ 
both in body and mind, he has the stiffness of 
wheelwork, instead of the free and graceful flex- 
ures of a living organism ;~personal habitudes that 
are as different as the round and round of a crank 
from the wavy motions of flame. But let it always 
be remembered that the manners can never be truly 
polished and genial unless the mind be benevolent 
and sincere. The dignity and grace of the soul 
must prelude the dignity and grace of the body. 

N0W5 in regard to ourselves and our classmates 
in college, and our predecessors and successors, 
also, I think this absence of gentlemanly manners, 
this clumsy and helter-skelter working of all the 
organs and faculties; or, as it often happened, a 
complete lockjaw of them all at the very time when 
most needed, was chargeable, at least in a great 
degree, to the absence of cultivated and refined 
female society ; and hence I infer that cultivated 
and refined female society is " indicated,'' as the 
doctors say, both as antidote and remedy for man- 
ners and address, either too bashful and con- 
strained, or too obtrusive and violent. For this 
reason, and for others set forth in the Address* to 
which I have already referred, I think one of the 
— - .... . .^ 

* Inaugural Address, pp. 117-126. 



ON COLLEGES. 



13 



Demands of the Age is, that both sexes shall be 
educated together. • And I am happy to say that, 
so far, our d priori reasoning on this question is 
ratified by the test of experience. 

Without the training of social intercourse, even 
learned men fail to become easy and affable in con- 
versation. Like those described by the Spectator, 
they may be rich enough to draw a draft for a 
thousand pounds, but, for present use, they have 
not a penny in their pockets. 

Does any one apprehend danger from the oppor- 
tunities afforded by such a united education? I 
reply that, as it seems to me, the danger will be 
increased the longer the separation is continued; 
so that the alternative really is, mutual association 
of the sexes, or Turkish seclusion. Nay, I go 
further, and I confidently submit to the candid 
judgment of the world that, even if some impro- 
prieties and indiscretions should at first result from 
combined male and female education, those impro- 
prieties and indiscretions would be justly charge- 
able to the old system of isolation, which excluded 
all apprenticeship to propriety and habitual self- 
restraint, rather than to the new arrangement, 
which only restores that order of nature which God 
appointed for children in families, and for the holy 
relation of wedlock among adults. Suppose, ia; 



J^ DEMANDS OF THE AGE 

Turkey, the sequestration of women from men were 
to be suddenly abrogated ; or, in Spain, the duenna 
system of perpetual surveillance were at once 
abolished, doubtless, at first, the bounds of pro- 
priety, and even of innocence, would be trans- 
gressed, but would not these evil consequences be 
rightfully chargeable, not to the better system intro- 
^duced, but to the chronic mischiefs of the system 
-removed 1 Even when an inebriate takes and 
-keeps the pledge of total abstinence, his system 
suffers the new pains of a revulsion, and it requires 
•a long time to restore his diseased functions to a 
ihealthful state. 

Our general plan is, association of the sexes 
under sujpervision j non-association, without it. 

Another respect, in which our College is bound 
*to meet the advanced and advancing wants of the 
age, is in the solidity and breadth of the foundation 
■which it lays, not only for the professions, but for 
all the business vocations of after-life. It requires 
a vast deal more knowledge now to give a man a 
'respectable and safe standing in any condition of 
life than it did only a few years ago. The old 
frontiers of intelligence are removed far outward. 
Facilities for journeying and voyaging, and me- 
diums for communication while we remain at home, 
iaye so wonderfully increased, that the whole world 



ON COLLEGES. -j^g 

is now brought into the same neighborhood ; and 
surely a man ought to know something about his 
neighbors. The same amount of geographical 
knowledge which would have made a man respect- 
able fifteen, or even ten years ago, would not save 
him from the brand of ignorance now. The mate- 
rials are fast becoming as voluminous for a history 
of the United States as they were but a short time 
since for a history of the world. The use of ma- 
chinery in all the arts, trades and manufactures, 
and even in agriculture, renders it indispensable 
that every artisan, mechanic, manufacturer and 
farmer who wishes to be any thing more, on his 
own premises, than a wheel or an ox, should under- 
stand the principles and laws of the machinery 
he uses. 

And, what is most important, in addition to all 
this, the sciences are not only constantly enlarging 
their respective spheres of action and discovery, 
but they are, as it were, entering into copartner- 
ships with each other, and thus, by their combined 
powers, producing new and grand results, to which 
no individual of them, acting singly, could ever 
attain ; so that a man is bound not only to know 
more in regard to any one science, but more sci- 
ences. Formerly the telescope revealed to us the 
wonders of creation in the heavens above, and the 



•^Q DEMANDS OF THE AGE 

microscope in the earth below ; and Hercules would 
as soon have besought a pigmy to assist him in his 
Twelve Labors, as the astronomer would have ex- 
pected aid from the microscopist. Now the tel- 
escope daguerreotypes a picture of the heavens, and 
the microscope, by enlarging the minutest object in 
that picture millions of times, helps our concep- 
tions to seize upon the grandeur and magnificence 
of the original. Psychology had worked for ages 
on the awful problem of insanity, and had pro- 
duced nothing but the grossest superstitions and 
cruelties. Physiology lent its aid, and now ninety 
in a hundred of all the insane are curable. Phi- 
lology, in order to unriddle the deep questions of 
Ethnology, is looking through the successive layers 
of language, (if I may so call them,) which successive 
nations have spoken, — ^just as Geology looks through 
the successive strata of the earth's crust, in order 
to learn the history of its formation, — and is thus 
enabling history to perform a task otherwise im- 
possible. Philology reaches beyond history, and 
even beyond tradition. 

i Microscopy has become a fellow-worker with 
Anatomy and Pathology in regard to the structural 
changes produced by disease, and is thus pouring 
light upon that realm of darkness, out of which so 
much of human suffering has come. The laws of 



ON COLLEGES. J^ 

meclianical motion are made to illustrate the laws 
and properties of all the colors in the rainbow. 
Under the combination of astronomy with geology, 
the moon solves problems respecting the thickness 
of the earth's crust, and shows the density of its 
interior. The chemist, the botanist, the mineral- 
ogist, the entomologist, and now the engineer, are 
uniting with the agriculturist, in developing and pro- 
ducing wonders, whose authors in any other age of 
the world would have been worshipped as demi-gods, 
or hung as wizards. Steamboats, railroads and 
magnetism have become grand agents, not only in 
commerce and in politics, but in the general diffu- 
sion of knowledge and of religious truth ; and though 
a man should now live only to the age of seventy 
years, he can do more work than one of the old 
patriarchs with his seven hundred. How difficult 
and how expensive it was only a dozen years ago to 
determine longitudes, and how impossible to de- 
termine them with exactness ! Several chronom- 
eters were carried across the ocean in order to get 
the mean of their aggregate errors. They were 
also carried, voyage after voyage, to eliminate frac- 
tions of error by getting the mean error of many 
means of error. Now, through the instrumentality 
of the Telegraph, longitudes can be ascertained as 
a mere incident, and with an accuracy approaching 
2 



J8 DEMANDS OF THE AGE 

that of Omniscience. Who would have thought 
that the first man who ever drew out an iron wire 
and the man who first discovered glass were taking 
the essential preliminary steps to the transmission 
of intelligence by lightning, and that iron and glass, 
in the telegraph and in architecture, were to be- 
come Institutions ? Who would have thought that 
when the Marquis of Worcester first saw the lid 
of a tea-kettle thrown up by the boiling of the water 
within it, he was co-operating with the first man 
who ever wove a sail, or shaped an oar, or turned 
a wheel, to give mankind their present marvellous 
power of navigating the seas and of transporting 
themselves and their burdens across the land ? 

The value of a co-operation or copartnership 
among the sciences may be proved negatively as 
well as positively. Such admirable works as the 
Bridgewater Treatises, and Paley's Natural Theol- 
ogy, have not produced half the efiect upon the 
character and life of men which they would have 
done had they recognized the natural and specific 
consequences which God has attached both to the 
observance and to the violation of the laws of Na- 
ture ; that is, had they wedded Human Philosophy 
to their own Divine Philosophy. 

" In 1843,'' says Mr. Edwin Chadwick, of Lon- 
don, '' an epidemic raged in Glasgow, and there was 



ON COLLEGES. jg 

scarcely a family, high ol* low, who escaped attacks 
from it ; but at Glasgow they have an exceedingly 
well-appointed, well-ventilated prison, and in that 
prison there was not a single case of the epidemic ; 
and in consequence of the over-crowding of the hos- 
pitals, which killed some two thousand people, they 
took forty cases into the prison, and not one of 
them spread. ''Infact,'^he adds, "there are so 
many classes of disease so completely within man- 
agement, that medical men who have the care and 
custody of those who are in comparatively well-con- 
ditioned places, are in the habit of saying, in rela- 
tion to cases in their private practice, ' Oh, if I 
had but that case in prison, I could save it.' '^ So 
that while criminals, contemners of the laws of 
God and man, escaped with life, the virtuous and 
pious fell victims to disease, because Human Phi- 
losophy had been divorced from Divine Philosophy, 
in the teachings of men. This shows what re- 
wards God gives to knowledge. 

In looking back through history, we find many 
instances where men came up to the very verge 
of a grand discovery, but failed to make it for 
want of a little more knowledge, or a wider 
outlook of mind. In that celebrated passage in 
Cicero, against atheism, where he says that no 
number of the letters of the alphabet thrown pro- 



20 DEMiLNDS OF THE AGE 

miscuously upon the ground, would so arrange 
themselves as to produce even a single verse of the 
Annals of Ennius, it is obvious that he had in his 
mind all the ideas which, if properly combined, 
would have produced the Art of Printing ; and if 
he had had one dash of Yankee sagacity in him, he 
would have caught the glorious vision, and the 
world would not have had to wait, through fifteen 
hundred years of darkness and suffering, for Faust 
and Guttenberg. Why was the discovery of gold 
in California so long delayed ? Had not the abo- 
rigines roamed over that land from time immemo- 
rial ? Had not the Spaniards lived there hundreds 
of years'? But all this was of no avail. The 
world must wait until a man went there who had 
eyes that saw, because he had a mind that thought. 
One may traverse a prairie, in quest of animal or 
man, and fail to discover him, because his vision 
is ten yards or even ten barleycorns too short ; so 
that if he could have seen but ten yards, or only 
ten barleycorns farther, all his previous search 
would have been rewarded and all his subsequent 
search saved. It is just so with those w^ho dwell 
in the great realms of Science, or make explora- 
tions into them. These realms are stored with 
truth ; but whether that truth shall be discovered 
by the searchers after it, whether it shall be recog- 



ON COLLEGES. 21 

nized even by men who stumble over it, depends 
upon the length of their vision and their previous 
equipment in knowledge. 

Here, then, we behold another grand «ivant of the 
age, — the preparation of large-minded men, — of 
men in whose capacious souls there is room enough 
for many sciences, who can see the relations be- 
tween these sciences, and wed them together for 
new and grander achievements. In a word, more 
knowledge must be imparted by teachers, and stu- 
dents must be incited and trained to acquire more. 
We talk about " a thousand horse-power'^ in 
mechanics, and " a thousand devil-power'^ in des- 
potism ; why should we not be able to speak with 
equal propriety of "a thousand angel-power'^ in 
benevolence and in the founding of wise and be- 
neficent institutions ? It will not do to allow the 
old saying in regard to our colleges to be any longer 
true, that if the students were required to be ex- 
amined in order to get out, on what they are exam- 
ined in order to get in, they must remain in college 
forever. 

It was the same idea, in substance, that gave 
pungency to the epigram on the celebrated English 
Universities : 

" No wonder that Oxford and Cambridge, profound. 
In learning and science so greatly abound ; 



22 



DEMANDS OF THE AGE 

Since all carry thither a little each day, 

And we meet with so few who bring any away.^^ 



Now, how shall this increased acquisition be se- 
cured 1 I answer, not wholly in any one way, but 
partially in several ways. 

1. We must demand something more as a pre- 
requisite for admission into college. 

2. We must pay far more attention to the health 
of the students, not only by teaching the physio- 
logical laws of health, but by training students to 
an habitual obedience to them. Solomon does not 
say teach a child the way he should go, but he says 
" tfrain'^''' him, which means that the child shall be 
required to do the thing himself, and to repeat it 
again and again, and ten times again, until it be- 
conies a habit. As physical exercise enters so 
largely into the means of securing health, it is cer- 
tain that no college can ever maintain a general 
condition of high health among its students, unless 
they spend some hours every day in muscular effort. 
Hence the faculty of Antioch College require exer- 
cise of its students every day. At the ringing of 
a bell the teachers meet the scholars, for exercise, as 
they meet them, in the recitation-room, for lessons. 
We also encourage manual labor in every practicable 
way ; and if a liberal public, or a liberal individ- 
ual, would give us land for agricultural, or even for 



ON COLLEGES. 23 

horticultural purposes, we promise them that the 
old injunction, to till 'the ground and dress ity 
shall not be forgotten. For a man who wishes, 
before quitting this world, to leave in operation 
behind him some machinery for good, would not the 
reflection that, while he is lying in his grave, a 
hundred generations of students would be growing 
lusty and strong on land which he had given for 
their use, be almost suflScient to keep his very bones 
in a state of preservation ? 

With better health of the body, we can obtain 
more work of the mind, and hence can save that 
prodigious loss which now comes from the real, not 
the feigned, indispositions of scholars. I have au- 
thentic information of one college class in this 
country, one half of whose students died within 
three years after they graduated. Students ought 
to leave college in better bodily health than when 
they entered it. There is fault somewhere if they 
do not. Parents are responsible for the health of 
children and youth. The constitution being given, 
men are responsible for their own health and length 
of life, as they are for their character. God has 
ordained, it is true, that all men must die at some 
time; but he has left a blank in the decree, in 
which, within certain limitations^ each one may 
insert, for his own death, what date he pleases. 



24 DEMANDS OF THE AGE 

3. We must have the latest and best apparatus 
for the explanation of the diflferent subjects of 
study, and thus avail ourselves of the great natural 
law by which we acquire knowledge so much more 
rapidly through the eye than through any other 
sense. 

4. We must have better teaching, which can 
come only through better teachers. Here we have 
great hope. Two things, — the methods of teach- 
ing and the motives for learning, — have been in- 
definitely improved within the few past years. Let 
me tell the farmers of the West that the old meth- 
ods of teaching are fairly represented by their old 
methods of reaping, — an acre a day, and the reaper 
almost breaking his back by that. The new meth- 
ods of teaching are represented by the new reapers, 
which in a day gather in the wealth of prairies. 
We have the testimony of all our most intelligent 
students, that they xieYerfeU such teaching before. 

In regard to motives, we use in Antioch College 
no artificial stimulus. We have no system of 
prizes, or honors, or place-takings. We appeal to 
no dissocial motive, where the triumph of one com- 
petitor involves the defeat of another. We hold it 
to be unchristian for us to place children or youth 
in such relations to each other that, if one suc- 
ceeds the other must fail ; that, if one rival wins 



ON COLLEGES. 25 

the prize his co-rival mtlst envy him, or repine at 
his own loss, or both. We would not cultivate the 
intellect at the expense of the affections, — what the 
world calls greatness, at the expense of goodness. 

I hold it to be indisputable, that all healthy, well- 
organized, and well- trained children love knowledge 
as surely as they love honey. But children will 
not accept even honey itself if they must put their 
hands into a live beehive to get it ; and have not 
some schools as many stings and as much poison in 
them as a maddened swarm of bees ? Nay, I have 
often seen the sweetest knowledge administered to 
children as preposterously as it would be to take a 
bowl of honey, and, calling up a youthful group, to 
pour it into their ears, or on the top of their heads, 
or on the nape of their necks, or the soles of their 
feet. Who would love honey administered in such 
a way ? But let one teaspoonful of it glide sweetly 
over the papillae of their tongues, and you must 
make them very honest to prevent their getting it 
afterward wherever they can find it. Our expe- 
rience is, that knowledge, rightly administered to 
pupils who have been rightly trained, needs none 
of the fiery condiments of emulation to make it 
palatable. In teaching, emulation is a resource to 
supply the absence of skill. 

5. Another method, kindred to the one last men- 



26 



DEMANDS OF THE AGE 



tioned, of carrying the college student farther out- 
ward into the domain of knowledge during his 
college life, consists in improving those seminaries 
which profess to prepare students for college, and 
especially in improving the Common Schools of the 
country. Let children be better educated in the 
Common Schools, and they will not only be farther 
advanced on the road to learning when they arrive 
at the college-going age, but by force of their bet- 
ter-disciplined minds, their knowledge of tools, and 
skill in their use, so to speak, they will be able to 
learn much faster and more profoundly after they 
enter. Hence, all who wish well to colleges, must 
first wish well to Common Schools, and must do all 
that lies in their power to elevate the standard of 
popular education. Feeling the weight of this 
idea like a moral obligation upon me, I have spent 
the greater part of our long summer vacation, now 
just closed, in attending Teachers' Institutes, in 
this and the neighboring States,, teaching teachers 
how to teach. Though I may never see the fruits 
of this labor during my mortal life, yet I believe I 
shall see it when it is gathered into the Lord's 
garner. But whether I see it or not is immaterial, 
provided only it is there. 

6. I have another suggestion, more important 
than any of the preceding. It contemplates an 



ON COLLEGES. 27 

improvement which will not only hasten the ac- 
quisition, but heighten the quality of all knowledge. 
Though I do not claim it as a discovery, yet it is 
more beautiful than any discovery, whether of a 
new continent upon the earth, or of a new planet in 
the heavens, — I mean an improvement in the con- 
duct and moral habits of college students. 

From what I have seen and heard of colleges in 
this country and in Europe, I have reason to be- 
lieve that not less than one quarter, increasing in 
many cases to one third, of the mental power of 
students runs to waste, and worse than waste, 
through some form of vice or immorality. I here 
speak of the mind of a college as a single quantity, 
as a unit. The mind of the students of a college, — 
that is, the mind of the college, — is capable of being 
conceived of in the mass, — as an aggregate, — and 
of being mathematically expressed. And, consid- 
ering all this gathering or assemblage of the glori- 
ous capacities and endowments of the students as 
an integral sum, — as one, — I say that I have reason 
to believe that one quarter part of it, at least, and 
sometimes more, is wasted and lost through some 
form of sensual indulgence or immorality, — just as 
a certain per-centage of a farmer's wheat-crop may 
be lost or destroyed by a devastating flood, or by 
noxious vermin. Nor, under the terms indulgence, 



28 DEMAiTDS OF THE AGE 

or vice, or immorality, do I here mean to include 
the remoter consequences of an undue gratification 
of appetite, accumulating until they result in de- 
bility or chronic ailments. These, I am aware, are 
usually considered venial ofiences, (if they are con- 
sidered at all,) though nothing seems to me more 
absurd, and few things more impious than to sup- 
pose that He who numbers the hairs of our heads, 
takes no notice of the contents of our stomachs. I 
mean to include only the grosser forms of violating 
God's laws, such as frequenting city haunts of dis- 
sipation, with their awful havoc of all the powers 
of both body and mind; patronizing eating and 
drinking saloons in cities, or the less attractive 
groceries and shops of rural districts ; entertain- 
ments given by students at their rooms or else- 
where, in which alcoholic beverages take a part ; 
all forms of gaming ; hiring horses and carriages, 
and riding out of town on what is called a '^ spree,'' 
— though I know not from what language this vile 
word came to us, and am disposed to think it came 
from below, and not from above. These, and kin- 
dred practices, injurious to health, wasteful of time, 
vulgarizing to manners, debasing to morals, and 
fatal to all high and noble aspirations and plans of 
life ; these rob time and rob talent ; that is, they 
rob us of the capital stock of that youthful mind, 



ON COLLEGES. 29 

and vigor, and opportumty, which God sends into 
the world with every new generation, and they rob 
us of them in not less than the appalling proportions 
I have mentioned. They burn out the candle of life 
in youth, and there the victim stands, all the rest of 
his days, nothing but the socket of a man. Now, 
to the moral accountant, what a sheet does this 
present ! One quarter part of the working capital 
invested in our colleges, carried over at once to the 
wrong side, in the profit and loss account of the 
ledger of life — lost to usefulness and to duty, to 
honor and to happiness.* 

But let us suppose a transfer in our books of this 
one item to the side of gain. You see at once that 
it would be equal to adding an entire year to the 
college course of our students, taken as a whole. 
Their present four years would become equivalent 
to five years, and every teacher knows that the 
fifth or additional year would be w^orth either two 
of the others. 

All the earnest professors in the colleges of our 
country are exclaiming, "Oh! if we could have 
another year ! Give us an additional year for en- 
larging and rounding off the education of our pu- 
pils, and then we would show you proud results !'' 

* See Appendix. 



gQ DEMANDS OF THE AGE 

Whatever college faculty can expel vice and im- 
morality from its borders, has found this additional 
year ! So much for the increased amount of 
knowledge. 

I But I hold that these truths bear upon the 
quality of knowledge not less than upon its quan- 
tity. 

I hold it to be one of the laws of God that the 
talents of man can be developed in the best way 
and can produce the most beneficial results only 
when they act in full consonance with all the pre- 
cepts and the principles of religion. The pursuit 
of knowledge or science is the pursuit of truth. 
All truth comes from God. No knowledge or sci- 
ence, therefore, can be vitalized by the true life, 
breathed upon by the true spirit, or come into 
the human consciousness irradiated with the same 
empyrean glory with which it emanated from 
God, unless it is acquired and embraced by a 
virtuous and a religiously affected soul. We 
should grasp knowledge, not with one only, but 
with all our faculties. Behold an infant, when its 
curiosity is intensely aroused by a new toy. It sub- 
jects the plaything to all its senses. It handles, 
eyes, smells, tastes, and puts it to its ear. Every 
sense that holds any relation to it fastens upon it 
with a new grasp, and creates a new tie between it 



ON COLLEGES. gj 

and the inquirer's mind* So with knowledge ; it 
should be seized and appreciated by all our facul- 
ties that have relations to it. To the merely sci- 
entific mind, for instance, there are several dififerent 
kinds of rays or influences emitted or produced by 
the sun. It illuminates, it warms, and it effects 
new chemical arrangements among atoms. Now 
the optician analyzes its light ; the galvanist meas- 
ures its heat, and the chemist notes the atomic 
changes wrought by its chemical power. But to 
the religious- minded man, whenever he beholds that 
glorious orb through the prism of our heavenly 
Father's care and love, he sees something above 
and beyond what optician, galvanist, or chemist can 
see. Its beams are irradiated and hallowed by a 
diviner effulgence than that which reaches the nat- 
ural eye ; they penetrate his heart with a warmth 
more vital and gladdening than any the nerves can 
feel, and they so purify and re-combine the ele- 
ments of thought and affection as to distil the 
elixir of a celestial joy through all his soul and 
over all his days. The philosopher looks at the 
scientific properties of matter, and admires ; the 
Christian beholds not only the gift, but the Giver, 
and adores. The one has only the knowledge of 
truth; the other the rapture of devotion. They 
have two horizons, one of which embraces the won- 



g2 DEMANDS OF THE AGE 

ders of nature; but the other embraces not only 
all nature's wonders, but their more wonderful 
Author also. Who would not rather see all the 
rays of a spectrum than a part of them 1 On his 
own principles, the scientific man must admit that 
the bliss of beholding and comprehending must in- 
crease with the amplitude of the horizon surveyed, 
and the magnificence and beautiful variety of the 
objects it embraces. Does not the eye which stands 
in such a relation to the dew-drops that they are 
all transmuted into pearls, and each reflects the 
splendors of the firmament, behold a lovelier sight 
than the eye to which they appear only as opaque 
globules of water ? and shall not the eye behold a 
still more glorious vision, which sees reflected in 
every dew-drop, not the heavens only, but the 
Majesty that sitteth upon the heavens ? 

How much vaster and more glorious do the 
heavens appear when seen by the eye of science, 
than when seen by the eye of sense ! So much 
beyond all scientific glory will they appear when 
seen by the eye of religion. 

To the devout heart, all the objects in the uni- 
verse, however minute or however magnificent, are 
clothed with a divine and luminous ether, whose 
beauty and radiance are invisible to the soul that 
sin has struck with its blindness. The filial and 



ON COLLEGES. gg 

trusting lover of God lives in the presence of splen- 
dors, outside and beyond what Shakspeare, with 
all his genius, ever beheld ; for, to see the great 
and beneficent Father in all his works, does " gild 
refined gold, and paint the lily, and throw a new 
perfume on the violet, and add another hue unto 
the rainbow.'' 

^' I, too, had wandered," says Goethe, " into 
every department of knowledge, and had returned, 
early enough satisfied with the vanity of science.'' 
He never could have spoken thus of the " vanity 
of science" if he had beheld science under its re- 
ligious aspects. No part of the temple of knowl- 
edge can ever seem empty to any votary who 
sees the spirit of God that dwells within, and glori- 
fies it. 

I affirm, then, with the logical emphasis and 
positiveness of demonstration, that no man can look 
upon any kind of knowledge, however common or 
however abstruse it may be, — whether the multipli- 
cation table or the problem of the asymptote, — in 
the full majesty of its proportions, or in the blessed 
sanctities of its ministrations, unless he receives it 
into a virtuous and a reverent heart. The profligate 
man, even when mastering the most brilliant and 
enchanting series of truths, is only like a sick man 
when eating the most delicious tropical fruits, who 
3 



g^ DEMANDS OF THE AGE 

may indeed feel the substance of their fibre upon 
his tongue, but whose distempered palate can not 
revel on the exquisite richness of their flavor ; or 
he is like a jaundiced botanist^ who may trace the 
wonderful structure of plants, but all the beauty 
of their many-colored tintings is lost to his yellow- 
painting vision. When the staggering inebriate 
looks up to the firm heavens, he thinks the stars 
are reeling and plunging before his eyes, though it 
is only himself who plunges and reels. And so to 
one who does not recognize the attributes of God 
in his philosophic contemplations, the eternal veri- 
ties of the universe float loose and vagrant before 
his gaze, the starry worlds above are but as drift- 
wood, tossed hither and thither in the chaos of im- 
mensity, and he is bound to men only by the base 
tie of selfishness, and not by the sanctities of broth- 
erhood, as children of a common Father. 

Vice and immorality, then, and the promptings 
of an irreligious heart, stand in direct antagonism 
to all true progress in knowledge ; and under their 
influence, w^hatever knowledge may be acquired is 
shorn of its divines t beauties. May all university 
and college Faculties, then, hunt and scourge these 
pests of literary institutions from their precincts ; 
not necessarily by the excision of the offenders; 
not necessarily by penalties ; but by opening to 



ON COLLEGES. gg 

their pupils loftier and nobler views of human duty 
and destiny and of the soul's capacities for excel- 
lence ; or, as Dr. Chalmers so beautifully expresses 
it^ " by the expulsive power of a new affection. '^ 

Such are the principal means of increasing the 
quantity and improving the quality of the work 
done in a college. Whatever more is to be effected 
within the length of time now devoted to a college 
course, must be done by the division of labor. 
The utilities of knowledge, too, must be always 
kept reverentially in view. No matter how seem- 
ingly unconnected with human affairs or remote 
from human interests a newly-discovered truth 
may appear to be, time and genius will some day 
make it minister to human welfare. When Dr. 
Franklin was once sceptically asked, what was the 
use of some recondite and far-off truth which had 
just been brought to light, ^' What,'^ said he, "is 
the use of babies ?" 

But the grand object, the main and chief thing, 
in which we wish to have our College respond to 
the Demands of the Age, pertains to the intimate 
and indissoluble union and connection which God 
has ordained to exist between science, on the one 
hand, and religion on the other ; and by religion, I 
mean the great ideas and affections pertaining to 
human brotherhood and to practical obedience to 



36 



DEMAm)S OF THE AGE 



the precepts of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. One 
of the aphorisms which have immortalized the name 
of Lord Bacon, is, " Knowledge is power.'' Fol- 
lowing his directions, mankind have obtained knowl- 
edge, and that knowledge has endowed them with 
powers such as Bacon himself could never have 
conceived. And now we want another aphorism, to 
be placed over that of Lord Bacon, and written in 
such large and luminous characters, that the whole 
world shall read it, — the aphorism that " Virtue 
AND Religion are Power." This aphorism has 
regard to the use we make of the power we possess. 
It teaches us the divine truth, that power, hallowed 
by benevolence, by the Golden Rule of doing as we 
would be done by, is the most precious, the most 
exalting of human blessings, is Godlike ; but that 
power profaned by selfishness, by doing as we would 
not be done by, is one of the greatest of human 
curses, is fiend-like. In Bacon's time, the grand 
inquiry was, how to obtain power ; in our time, the 
grand inquiry is, how to use the power we have ob- 
tained. And here is the test ; here are the balances 
of the sanctuary, which will determine whether in- 
dividuals or nations have risen up out of barbarism 
into Christian light, by the wise, humane, and re- 
ligious use of their power, or whether that power, 
by being used for selfish ends, has sunk them as 



ON COLLEGES. g>T 

far below common barbarism as Christianity is 
above it. 

I said before that the sciences have begun to form 
partnerships among themselves, by which they are 
achieving grander and more splendid results than 
they were able, individually, to produce, — micros- 
copy and telescopy, pneumatics and hydraulics, 
magnetism and geometry, physiology and psychol- 
ogy, and chemistry, which has the largest firm of 
them all, — these no longer work alone, but in com- 
panies. In the workshops of the scientific artificer, 
half-a-dozen or more of the head sciences, as they 
may be called, are seen plying their hands together, 
and contributing their respective parts to some 
world-advancing labor. 

Bearing these facts in your minds, one of the 
advanced ideas, pertaining to our College, to which 
I wish now to call your attention, is this. As the 
sciences compass new and grander results by co- 
operative labors, so if Science and Humanity can 
associate together; or, to use a figure of speech 
which will be better understood in the Market and 
on the Exchange, — if Science and Humanity can 
form a Joint Stock Company ; if what we call the 
worldly wisdom of Progress can enter into- alliance 
with the divine wisdom of Benevolence, or Good- 
will to Man, and thus combine their forces for the 



33 DEMANDS GF THE AGE 

great enterprises of Humanity and Pra-ctical Piety, 
then we have reason to believe that their achieve- 
ments will exceed all our imaginations as greatly 
as our mechanical attainments have surpassed Lord 
Bacon's imagination ; and that blessings will rain 
down copiously from the heavens, and spring up 
luxuriantly from the earth, and be wafted to us on 
every breeze, and renewed with the changing sea- 
sons, until man shall be transfigured and society be 
transformed, and much of the lost image of the 
Creator be restored to the race. 

Time will not allow me to enlist in the service 
"of this argument the multitudinous illustrations 
which history and the present condition of society 
press upon me for acceptance. I must content 
myself with a few illustrations, — with some, where 
'worldly knowledge has lost indefinitely, by refusing 
to co-operate with the divine ; and with some, 
where the divine department has lost indefinitely 
by repudiating the aid of scientific or secular knowl- 
edge. Of the first, first : 

Leading European writers on Political Economy, 
— great and illustrious names in their " tribe,'' — 
have discussed the questions of their science, as 
though it were one of pecuniary accumulation, of 
money-making only ; and the whole social system 
«of the foremost nation in Europe embodies and ex- 



ON COLLEGES. gg 

emplifies this one idea completely and exclusively. 
The " Wealth of Nations," with them, means how 
many dollars or pounds sterling a nation might be 
sold for ; how large an inventory, if it should die, 
its executors or administrators would have to ren- 
der to the probate, or surrogate's court ; what, in 
fine, the nation ought to bring under an auction- 
eer's hammer ! Hence it is maintained, both prac- 
tically and theoretically, that land should be held 
in vast estates, or masses, and farmed out by the 
lordly proprietor to lessees who are never to have 
a fee-simple title to any part of it, and that it 
should be worked by day-laborers, or hirelings, who 
are never to have even so much as a lease of it. 
And the reason given is, that in this way greater 
crops can be raised than if each laborer had his 
freehold and were independent. Now with this 
system of feudal lordships, of tenancies by middle- 
men, and of serfage among laborers, it is obvious 
that, after we descend from the rank of proprietors, 
there can be no personal independence, little pe- 
cuniary comfort or competence, and less education. 
And what is this but sacrificing producers to pro- 
duction ? cultivators to cultivation ? men to crops ? 
immortal souls to potatoes and the ruta-haga? 
What is this but saying that millions of men and 
women shall be worked like cattle, imbruted in 



40 DEMANDS OF THE AGE 

ignorance, their noble aspirations stifled, and the 
infinite possibilities of celestial harvests from mind 
and heart all blasted, in order to raise more wheat, 
and barley, and beans ?"* How closely, in many 
important particulars, does such a doctrine for the 
Caucasian approximate to the policy of the Cuban 
or Louisiana sugar-planter, who works gangs of 
fresh slaves to death once in five or six years be- 
cause from their blood, and sweat, and agony he 
can coin enough money to replace his dead men 
with live ones, to be worked to death in their turn, 
and still clear a handsome per-centage out of the 
slaughter ? With them the ten dollars in an eagle, 
ay, the ten cents in a dime, are the Ten Command- 
ments. My friends, when Ptolemy devised a solar 
system, according to which sun, and stars, and 
galaxies, and all the constellations that fill the 
abysses of space, revolved, once in twenty-four 
hours, around this little mustard-seed of an earth, 
— for the earth is but a mustard-seed, when com- 
pared with the magnitude of the physical universe, 
— I say, when Ptolemy made the infinite so second- 
ary to the finite, he understood astronomy right 

* Mr. Seniorj one of the most distinguished of British econ- 
omical writers, says expressly that ^^ wealth , and not happi- 
ness,^^ is the subject with which the political economist has to 
deal. 



ON COLLEGES. ^^ 

well, compared with the knowledge of those who 
make the mighty and everlasting interests of heart 
and soul, of free thought, of education, of purity, 
of piety, and of happiness, revolve round the ware- 
houses where they store their quarters of wheat and 
their hogsheads of sugar. 

To write a work on the " Wealth of Nations,'' 
and say nothing of the health, education, or morals of 
the people at large, is as though a man should write 
a book on Mechanics, and ignore the lever, wheel 
and axle, pulley, screw, inclined plane, and wedge. 

But suppose the love of humanity to join coun- 
sels with the love of money-making ; suppose the 
cultivation of the soul to be made an accompani- 
ment, if not a preliminary to the cultivation of the 
soil ; suppose the indisputable truth to be under- 
stood that education is not only the greatest instru- 
ment of gain, but the best preparation for the 
enjoyment of gain, then would mankind be reward- 
ed,, not only by the material " wealth of nations,'' 
but by the imperishable riches of spiritual well- 
being. The ethical must be wedded to the finan- 
cial ; not to debase the former, but to elevate the 
latter. No race of bondmen, smothered in the ig- 
norance essential to slavery, can ever earn so much 
by their muscles as they could earn by their wits, 
had they been educated and free. The hand is 



42 DEMAM)S OF THE AGE 

almost valueless at one end of the arm unless there 
is a brain at the other end. God has so consti- 
tuted the universe that no system, — not any man 
nor any government, — can ever prosper that does 
not recognize the soul as superior to the body. ' 

The " Population Theory'' of Malthus, as it is 
called, proceeds upon a similarly fatal idea. It 
derives all its plausibility from the assumption that 
Appetite, is never to be brought under the dominion 
of Reason and Conscience. Hence, instead of find- 
ing barriers to the excessive multiplication of the 
human race, in those restraints on the appetites 
which forethought, duty, and religion supply, it in- 
vokes the demons of Starvation, War, and Pesti- 
lence to slaughter millions of the successive gen- 
erations of men, in order to reduce the number of 
mouths to the quantity of food. Instead of Self- 
control, as a check to excessive numbers, it en- 
thrones Moloch upon the earth, and makes Hunger, 
Fire, and Sword his ministers of wrath for the 
depopulation of a world.* 

There is no more self-evident truth than that, in 

* The doctrine of Mr. Malthus, that population, unless sub- 
jected to moral restraints, tends to outrjin production, not- 
withstanding the denial and revolt with which it has been 
received by many philanthropic and pious men, is still abun- 
dantly demonstrable. Grant the invalidity of some of the 



ON COLLEGES. 



43 



certain circumstances, and those circumstances, 
too, not diflScult to be imagined, it is a greater 

arguments wliich have been used in support of tlie views of Mr. 
Malthus, such, for instance, as the dogma that the best soils are 
first taken up for cultivation, and afterward the poorer, — a 
view which has been utterly refuted by Mr. Carey. Grant all 
that can be claimed for that beautiful provision of nature, by 
which the vegetable world converts the inorganic elements of 
the earth into nutriment for the sustentation of the human 
race, and can repeat the process forever. Still, if there be a 
power and a tendency in the human race to iucrease geomet- 
rically, (as, without moral restraint, there certainly is,) then, 
in the course of time, (and not a very extended course, either,) 
it is obvious the people would so multiply as to encroach upon 
and trample out the vegetation itself. Suppose, even then, that 
the fancies of the French chemists, in the days of French athe- 
ism, should become literal truth, and that a hundred- weight 
of common earth could be run through a domestic laboratory 
every morning, and converted into a hundred pounds of good 
wheaten bread, or into any other desirable article of food, still 
this geometrical ratio would soon carry the population to a 
point where the dead must be buried perpendicularly, and not 
horizontally, for want of room; and, could the dead them- 
selves be made to support the living, the census-taker would 
soon show more acres of people than the land-surveyor of a 
nation could show acres of land, and the inhabitants in a square 
mile would outnumber the square rods, or square yards, or 
square feet, in the same space. Nor would concentric layers of 
people over all the earth, tier above tier, or story above story, 
cloud-high, nor even the building of ells on all its sides, keep 
pace with the accumulating difficulty. Mai thus is demonstrably 
right in his theory. The infinitude of his mistake consisted in 



44 DEMANDS OF THE AGE 

crime to give life than it would be to take it ; a 
greater crime to be a parent than to be a murderer. 
Intelligent forethought, reason, conscience, then, in. 
the formation of matrimonial connections, and not 
starvation, war and pestilence, are the true anti- 
dotes against the calamities prophesied by Mal- 
thus, and assumed by him and all his school to be 
the divinely-ordained and ever- continuing calamity 
of the human race. It would not have been more 
barbarous toward man, nor more dishonoring to 
God, and it would have been a far more simple and 
self-adjusting remedy, had Malthus proposed can- 
nibalism, instead of famine, slaughter and plagues, 
as the true remedy for a redundant population ; 
for, by that method, a commissariat in war would be 
rendered superfluous ; and in peace, when the sup- 
ply at Nature's table should become exhausted, two 
mouths, — that of the eater and the eaten, — v^ould be 
stopped by one operation ! Such are the hideous 
consequences, when Philosophy discards Philan- 
thropy from its counsels ; and thus must human 
science always suffer when it refuses to be allied to 
divine science."^ 

his maintaining that tlie remedy is destruction, instead of show- 
ing that moral prevention is the antidote. 

* Why should the mainsprings of all social progress, health, 
intelligence, and morality be omitted ? 



ON COLLEGES. 45 

Let me now show how immensely the cause of 
religion has suffered because it has stood aloof, and 
looked with jealousy, and often with disdain, upon 
secular knowledge or science ; and hence I shall in- 
fer that the greatest Demand of the Age is that 
Religion and Science should be reconciled, harmon- 
ized, and led to work lovingly together. 

In speaking of the essential harmony between 
religion and science, I wish to premise that the 
constitution of my mind and all my habits of life 
dispose me to look to practical results, rather than 
to speculative opinions, — to actualities, rather than 
to theoretic possibilities. Modern effort runs tO 
the description or exposition of religious duty vastly 
more than to the performance of it. Hence great 
books are written for Christianity much oftener 

When visiting the Normal School at Dublin, in Ireland, 
with Archbishop Whately, an incident occurred which shows 
where the " wealth of nations" and the " morals of nations" in- 
terlink. A class was reciting, in Political Economy, on the 
subject of the " Demand and Supply" of labor. " Suppose," 
said the archbishop, '* a hundred laborers were wanted in a 
place, and only fifty should offer their services, what would be 
the consequence ?'' " They would be paid inore" said the lad. 
" But suppose," said the archbishop, " only a hundred were 
wanted, and two hundred should come, what then would be 
the consequence ?" " There would be a row,^ was the an- 
swer. 



^g DEMANDS OF THE AGE 

than great deeds are done for it. City libraries 
tell us of the reign of Jesus Christ, but city 
streets tell us of the reign of Satan. The pulpit 
only " teaches" to be honest ; the market-place 
"trains" to over-reaching and fraud; and "teach- 
ing" has not a tithe of the efficiency of " training.'' 
Christ never wrote a " Tract" in his life, but he 
went about doing good. His professed followers 
write " Tracts," but stay in their luxurious homes, 
while the hungry, the naked, the sick, and the pris- 
oner are left as Lazarus w^as by Dives. In our 
day, no religious association or convention is ever 
held, which, if resolutions had any self-executing 
power, does not pass resolutions enough to redeem 
half-a-dozen planets as bad as ours. I agree with 
the man who said he had read the " Acts^^ of the 
Apostles, but never their " Resolutions,'^'^ 

Between religion and science there must be a 
necessary harmony ; for both came from God, and 
therefore both are true ; and, if true, then they 
agree. Each is fitted to the other. Truth can 
never conflict with itself, nor God be the author of 
contradiction. No Work of God can ever come 
into collision with any Word of God. If, then, 
there must be an essential and an eternal harmony 
between all true religion and all true science, how 
arose that supposed antagonism between them, 



ON COLLEGES. 



47 



which, on account of its long continuance, has now 
become historic? History itself tells us how it 
came. After the night of the Dark Ages, at the 
time when* science first began to dawn upon the 
world, the Papal priesthood of that day made war 
upon it. They claimed to be the keepers, not only 
of the ark which contained all religious knowledge, 
but of the treasure-house that contained all secular 
knowledge also. Hence, when Galileo affirmed that 
the earth moved, the Inquisition commanded him, 
under pain of torture, imprisonment and death, to 
deny the fact. 

And there remain, to-day, in the library of the 
Inquisition, the very manuscripts of Galileo which 
the priesthood seized and sequestrated. There 
they remain, I say, sequestred, condemned, sealed 
with the Papal signet, so that the truths they re- 
veal might never more be spoken among men. Yet 
those truths are now taught to the children in our 
Common Schools, and at our firesides ! What an 
everlasting monument of the ignorance and bigotry 
of men when they lift themselves up against the 
power and knowledge of God ! And thus were the 
glorious attestations which astronomy makes to the 
power and wisdom of God shrouded for a time 
from the vision of men by a bigot's decree, and the 
immense benefits which those truths were able to 



^g DEMANDS OF THE AGE 

confer on geography, navigation, commerce, and 
discovery, postponed to a far later day. 

It was so, too, with the magnificent science of 
Geology. The hierarchs who claimed to be the 
depositaries of the will and wisdom of God sur- 
mised an odor of heresy in some of its doctrines, 
and therefore they denounced both the science 
and its authors. Omitting remoter instances, it 
was so, too, when Dr. Franklin discovered the 
identity of electricity and lightning, and prepared 
the lightning conductor. The ignorant ecclesiastic 
branded it as an impious attempt to parry and defy 
the thunderbolts of heaven. Surely if it was 
wicked to ward off a volley of lightning, and there- 
by escape conflagration and death, it must be still 
more wicked to treat the lightning so familiarly as 
to send errands by it, as by a boy ; and therefore 
Morse and House, in their magnetic telegraph, ac- 
cording to this doctrine, are now guilty of keeping 
tens of thousands of miles of impiety in good work- 
ing order. And even within the last ten years, 
when Dr. Simpson, of Edinburgh, discovered the 
power of chloroform to suspend consciousness, and 
thereby for a time to annihilate pain, (I do not refer 
to ether^ whose anaesthetic properties were discov- 
ered in this country,) a body of the clergy of the 
Scotch Presbyterian Church in Edinburgh placed 



ON COLLEGES. 



49 



upon their public records a resolution denouncing 
the discovery of it as impious, and its use as sinful. 
And the reason they gave for it was as miserable 
as their dogma was unphilosophical and unchristian. 
They said that God had declared that a woman 
should pass into the holy relationship of mother 
only through sorrow, and therefore whatever pre- 
vented that sorrow, as chloroform was designed to 
do, evaded the divine will, and must, of course, be 
sinful ; from which it would seem logically to fol- 
low, that the more pain one suffers in becoming a 
mother, the more well-pleasing is the case in the 
sight of God. 

But I mention these great historic cases, which 
every intelligent man is presumed to know, not so 
much for their own sakes as for the purpose of 
introducing another fact generally lost sight of. 
While the Inquisition was brandishing the ter- 
rors of two worlds to silence Galileo ; while the 
government expounders of the Scriptures were en- 
deavoring to strangle the great science of geology at 
its birth ; while the Scotch divines were denounc- 
ing the beneficent discoverer of chloroform ; while 
the hierarchies of the church were doing these 
things on a national and world-wide scale, what, 
think you, were meaner bigots doing in their nar- 
rower spheres ? For each king of a realm, what 
4 



gQ DEMANDS OF THE AGE 

multitudes of subordinate executive officers and 
magistrates there are ! And so, for one gigantic St, 
Peter at Rome, there were thousands of pigmy St. 
Peters scattered all over Christendom. For every 
arch-bigot, strangling the birth of world-renovating 
truths in mighty minds, hosts of petty bigots were 
stationed all over the land, resisting all progress 
toward new light and new knowledge in the common 
mind ! For one lofty Galileo who was forced to 
bow himself to the denial of a great astronomic 
truth, in order to escape torture ; ten thousand 
times ten thousand common men, in all the walks 
of life, were compelled to deny all the minor truths, 
proportionate to that sphere of knowledge and of du- 
ties, which they, the smaller Galileos, had discovered, 
in regard to religion, to morals, and to social life ; 
so that doubtless the world has suffered even more 
from the grand aggregate of small tyrannies than 
from the frightful enormity of great ones. And for 
the purpose of blasting to death all germs and seeds 
of new truth, Avhether scientific or social, whether 
blazing out from great minds, or glimmering from 
small ones, to illumine their respective skies, each 
bigot- smotherer of free thought had full access to 
the great dispensary of hell-pains, on which they 
were empowered to draw at all times, and for any 
quantity, free ! 



ON COLLEGES. ^^ 

At the Council of Tours, in IIGS, and at the 
Council of Paris, in 1209, all works on " Physics,'' 
or Natural Philosophy, were interdicted to the 
monks as '' sinful reading." Because Roger Bacon, 
the greatest light of the Middle Ages, tried some 
experiments, he was accused of practicing magic, 
and imprisoned by two popes, Nicholas III. and 
IV. In the famous decree of March 5th, 1616, 
against the system of Copernicus, sixty-nine years 
after the first edition of the Z>e Bevolutionihus^ it 
is called '^ falsa ilia doctrina Pythagorica^ Di- 
vincB ScTiptiiTCB omnino adversans^'^^ " that false 
Pythagorean doctrine, or system, so contrary to the 
sacred Scriptures.'' Even at a later period Kep- 
ler's Laws encountered the same prohibition in 
Protestant Germany. Perhaps it is not generally 
known that Descartes had a great work, on which 
he had spent many years of his life, and which he 
was just on the point of sending to press, when, in 
1633, the news of the sentence of the Inquisition 
passed on Galileo at Rome, reached him. He at 
once abandoned his plan of publication, and so the 
work was lost to his contemporaries, and, except 
some fragments, since found, to his successors. 
There is scarcely a more significant event in the 
whole history of science than the fact that Copernicus 
at first concealed his discovery of the true solar sys- 



52 



DEMANDS OF THE AGE 



tern in an anagram, and that Kepler did the same 
thing in regard to his '' Laws.'' They dared not 
trust those wonderful and divine truths to the igno- 
rant and bigoted world ; or, rather, to the ignorant 
and bigoted hierarchy which then governed it. Like 
Moses in the bulrushes, philosophic truth had to be 
hidden to save it from destruction ; and, like the 
infant Savior, religious truth had to flee into 
strange lands to save the young chiWs life from 
the Herods of bigotry. What a universal and 
spontaneous shout of praise hailed the discovery of 
the planet Neptune, by Leverrier, in 1846, — a dis- 
covery which has made the name of its author as 
enduring as the existence of the orb he revealed to 
an admiring world ! How different, had Leverrier 
felt constrained, like Copernicus and Kepler, through 
fear of ecclesiastical ignorance and persecution, to 
hide his discovery in an anagram ! 

Now, it was this hostility, waged against science 
for centuries by the priesthood who claimed a mo- 
nopoly of all truth, that alienated scientific men from 
the high, and I feel bound to add, the paramount 
claims of religion. And what has religion gained 
by this warfare ? Nothing ! On the contrary, its 
opposition to science has been a long series of dis- 
astrous and disgraceful failures and defeats. What 
vast libraries of theological hostility to the advance- 



ON COLLEGES. gg 

ment of science have gone into the ^^dead-letter'' 
office in the history of all Christian nations ! Noth- 
ing but Milton's " Limbo of Vanity'' would be suf- 
ficiently capacious to hold them. 
I Nor, on the other hand, is the calamity any less 
which scientific men have brought upon themselves 
by leaving out the idea of God, and the sentiment 
of religion, from their investigations and discov- 
eries in the field of Nature's laws. They can not 
fail to see that God works by uniform laws, and 
hence their reason must infer his Unity. They 
must see, also, that He works for good ends, and 
hence the irresistible conclusion in favor of his 
Benevolence. They see that His laws are the same 
everywhere ; that the gravitation which sways the 
farthest planet is the same that binds the earth in 
its orbit, or brings a mote to its surface ; and that 
the light which comes down from the remotest 
nebula holds common characteristics with that of 
the sun and moon, and is but a twin-beam, cheated 
by the same Father ; and hence they ought to infer 
His constant presence and omnipotence, and forever 
to feel toward Him as to an all-surrounding and all- 
enveloping Spirit of power and love. But philos- 
ophers have been prone to stop with the discovery 
of the law, and to forget the Law-maker ; to accept 
the gift, and forget the Giver ; and their conduct 



64 



DEMANDS OF THE AGE 



and their records sometimes seem to say : " Oh, if 
only the Deity were some fossil remain, so that 
Geology could label him and place him in its cab- 
inet ; or if only He were a leaf of some extinct, or 
some newly-discovered species of fern or lichen, so 
that botany could preserve him in its Tiorius siccus^ 
then, indeed, how delightful it would be to possess 
such a memorial of the All-in-All ; but as He is 
only the All-in-All, we may ignore his existence, 
and cease from daily communion with him.'^ 

The first idea which a philosopher, as a philos- 
opher^ ever acquires, is the indissoluble connection 
by which cause and effect are bound together. Does 
not the same philosophy teach him that the pres- 
ent and the future life are bound together as in- 
dissolubly as any two events in either of them can 
be? 

Do I not rightly say, then, that the greatest 
Demand of the Age is, that religion and science 
should be reconciled, and should become co-work- 
ers for the "blessing of man and the glory of God. 
The religious man must go with the scientific man 
to study God in his works. The scientific man 
must go with the religious man to worship God in 
his temples. Both must be men of secular knowl- 
edge. Both must be men of divine knowledge. The 
minister at God's altar must be able to look up 



ON COLLEGES. 



65 



and read the stars through the telescope of the 
astronomer ; and the astronomer, through the pre- 
cepts of the Christian religion and the example of 
Jesus Christ, must be able to look up, not to the 
stars only, but to God and to the immortality of 
men. The Academy and the Church must be but 
different apartments canopied by the same dome, — 
the all-comprehending dome of divine Providence ! 

No man can worship, intelligently, any more of 
God than he knows. A man can not worship God 
for his fulness of wisdom who is ignorant of the 
works in which that wisdom has been displayed. 
So no man can worship God for his love who has 
no perception of that love which is his leading at- 
tribute. Just so far as we have false views of God, 
what better is our worship of Him than idolatry ? 
We may render true worship and commit idolatry, 
in the same train of ascriptions. So far as our 
views of God are just, it is true worship ; so far as 
they are false, it must be idolatry. 

And here let me recur again to what I before 
said respecting the wonderful results of combining 
the sciences, — of forming, as it were, copartnerships 
between them, so as to effect grander results from 
their co-operative action than it would be possible 
to obtain from their isolated and solitary power, — 
the imponderable forces with mechanics, for in- 



gg DEMANDS OF THE AGE 

stance, physiology with psychology, and chemistry 
with almost every thing. And so when the facul- 
ties of the intellect, which make the political econ- 
omist, are united to those sympathies of the heart 
which make the philanthropist, their combined 
power will scale heights of human happiness which 
no amount of human knowledge, on the one hand, 
or intensity of love on the other, would ever be 
able alone to reach. 

How brilliant and how useful have been the re- 
sults, when criminal jurisprudence has sought the 
aid of science ; or, to recur to my former illustra- 
tion, has entered into copartnership with it. The 
detective police, with all their ingenuity, even un- 
der Fouche and Bonaparte, never had such flying 
messengers for the pursuit and arrest of fugitive 
offenders as is supplied by the Magnetic Tele- 
graph, which instantaneously stations an antici- 
pating oflicer in every city whither a culprit may 
hie for refuge ; which heralds his crime and paints 
his face, so that, which way soever he may flee, if 
he runs from the arms of one police, he runs into 
the jaws of another ! In how many scores of cases 
has chemistry tracked out the poisoning murderer, 
and brought crimes to light which the criminal 
thought were forever buried in the grave ! Here 
human science imitates Omniscience, or the All- 



ON COLLEGES. 5>jr 

Science, and even the corruption of his victim's 
body can not save the malefactor from the efiects 
of that analysis which can detect the deadly potion, 
even after the organs themselves are decayed. In 
Prussia, a thief robbed a barrel of its specie from a 
train of cars, filling the emptied cask with sand, so 
that no suspicion should be excited by its loss of 
weight. On consultation. Professor Ehrenberg sent 
to each of the stations at which the cars had stop- 
ped for a sample of the sand in its vicinity, and 
then, by means of his microscope, he identified the 
station from which the substituted sand had been 
taken. The station, once ascertained, it was easy 
to fasten upon the culprit from among the small 
number of employees there. 

Science has now a most extraordinary and be- 
neficent enterprise in hand for detecting adultera- 
tions in articles of food. The atomic particles of 
difi*erent" edibles or esculents, as of wheat or pota- 
toes, for instance, have a determinate form, shape 
and structure. Each atom has a distinctive pecu- 
liarity, a family face^ by which it can be distin- 
guished from all other kinds, as an African can be 
distinguished from a Caucasian, or a Jew from a 
Chinese. The cheaper substances, by which the 
more costly and valuable can be adulterated, have 
their respective physiognomies also. The micro- 



gg ^ DEMANDS OF THE AGE 

scope discerns between them as readily as a farmer 
discerns between his sheep and swine. 

The atom of the potato starch, — the cheapest, or 
one of the cheapest substances used for adulterating 
flour, — is said to be marked with a cross y so that 
the moment the microscope is applied, all the par- 
ticles of this ingredient turn state's evidence and 
make affidavit, certifying to the fraud under their 
own signature, " Potato Starch, his X mark !" 

And such, yea, and far greater, will be the re- 
wards of power and blessedness if Science and Re- 
ligion can clasp hands in concord, and while Science 
confers power. Religion will administer that power 
for beneficence alone ; while the one investigates 
the ascending series of Nature's laws, the other 
will moufit to the topmost pinnacle of discovery, 
and thus stand habitually nearer to the Divine In- 
telligence ; and while one adorns with the beauty 
of knowledge, the other will sanctify with the 
'' beauty of holiness." In the hour of trial and in 
the agonies of death, how wretched is the philos- 
opher, who, with all his learning, is without hope 
or trust in that Being on the threshold of whose 
judgment-seat he stands ; and, on the other hand, 
how contemptible is the religious teacher whose 
"zeal without knowledge," in matters of religion, 
fermenting, like acid and alkali, with his positive 



ON COLLEaES. gg 

errors on questions of philosophy, perpetually 
evolves the mephitic gases of mischievous supersti- 
tion or ridiculous nonsense ! The philosopher who 
blasphemes the holy laws of God from his impious 
heart, and the clergyman who blasphemes the sa- 
cred order of nature from his ignorant head, are 
natural results of the unnatural divorce between 
science and religion. Job said that God '^ setteth 
an end to darkness." In regard to some who un- 
dertake to expound religious truth from the pul- 
pit, it would be happy for the world if the "end'^ 
of their darkness had yet been reached. I trust 
St. Paul will not be held responsible for the out- 
rageous use so often made of his admonition to 
Timothy respecting " the oppositions of science, 
falsely so called;" for there has not been a true 
science for the last two hundred years against 
which this authority of the Apostle has not been 
invoked. " I think they are extremely mistaken," 
says Martin Luther, " who imagine the knowledge 
of philosophy and nature to be of no use to re- 
ligion." 

When Solomon says, " Wine is a mocker, and 
strong drink is raging;" and when the Apostle 
'Paul repeatedly classes ^' drunkenness" v^ith the 
most foul and fatal of crimes, what confirmation of 
his texts does the Christian minister find in the 



go . DEMANDS OF THE AGE 

sciences of Pathology and Psychology, which show 
alcohol to be among the deadliest of poisons for 
the body, and endowed with demoniac power over 
the soul ? 

And again, what a beautiful demonstration, that 
our merest worldly interests are best promoted by 
the performance of our highest duties, is found in 
the fact that all public charities for the Blind, for 
the Deaf and Dumb, for the Insane, for the Idiotic, 
save far more money than they cost. Wise be- 
nevolence is the soundest political economy. Self- 
ishness is loss ; self-sacrifice is gain. " Seek ye 
first the kingdom of God, and all these things 
[worldly needs] shall be added unto you.'' 

Milman, in his great history of Christianity, re- 
marks as follows : " Christianity may exist in a 
certain form in a nation of savages as well as in a 
nation of philosophers ; yet its specific character 
will almost entirely depend upon the character of 
the people who are its votaries. It must be con- 
sidered, therefore, in constant connection with that 
character ; it will darken with the darkness, and 
brighten with the light of each succeeding century ; 
in an uncongenial time it will recede so far from its 
essential nature as scarcely to retain any sign of its 
divine original ; it will advance with the advance- 
ment of human nature, and keep up the moral to 



ON COLLEGES. g-j^ 

the utmost height of the intellectual culture of 
man.'' 

How true it is that Christianity is made to shrink 
or expand to fit the intellectual and moral calibre 
of its disciples ! 

^' I observed with astonishment/' says Hum- 
boldt, " on the woody banks of the Orinoco, in the 
sports of the natives, that the excitement of elec- 
tricity by friction was known to these savage races, 
who occupy the very lowest place in the scale of 
humanity. Children may be seen to rub the dry, 
flat, and shining seeds or husks of a trailing plant 
until they are able to attract threads of cotton and 
pieces of bamboo cane. That which thus delights 
the naked, copper- colored Indian, is calculated to 
awaken in our minds a deep and earnest impres- 
sion. What a chasm divides the electric pastime 
of these savages from the discovery of a metallic 
conductor, discharging its electric shocks, or a pile 
composed of many chemically decomposing sub- 
stances, or a light-engendering, magnetic appa- 
ratus ! In such a chasm lie buried thousands of 
years that compose the history of the intellectual 
development of mankind." As different as the 
subject of electricity is in the mind of Humboldt's 
Indian child and in the minds of Arago and Fara- 
day, so different is Christianity in the mind of a 



g2 DEMANDS OF THE AGE 

barbarian neophyte and a Christian sage ! Oh, it 
would be ten thousand times less afflictive to a pious 
heart to hear a blind savage attempting to explain 
Babbage's Calculating Machine, or Lord Rosse's 
telescope, than to hear an ignorant man expounding 
the attributes of the all-wise and all-beneficent 
Jehovah. 

What reasonable man can doubt that a knowl- 
edge of the laws of God and of His divine order in 
nature would be most influential, not only in pro* 
tecting men from falling into new delusions, but in 
eliminating error from that hotchpot of theologic 
beliefs which is the present scandal of Christendom ! 
Since about the year 1840, tens and tens of thou- 
sands of men have been carried over to the delu- 
sions of Millerism. It is said that the " Chris- 
tian'' Church has lost two thousand members in 
this way. From such an insanity, one ounce of 
philosophic brains would have saved them all ! 

The pagans of the Caroline Islands do not be- 
lieve that the future happiness or misery of the 
human soul was predestinated before its existence ; 
or that its future condition is to depend at all upon 
what it has done or refused to do in this life ; but 
they believe that after the soul has left the body, 
by death, and while it is on its way to the spirit- 
land, it is met by the good and the evil divinities, 



ON COLLEGES. gg 

who fight for it and battle over it, as Greek and 
Trojan battled over the dead body of Patroclus ; 
and, as the supernal or infernal combatants chance' 
to prevail, the soul is borne away to Paradise or 
to Hades. How different is this creed, — that the 
eternal fate of a human soul is determined by the 
chances of a battle for its possession, carried on 
between rival divinities, after it has left the body, — 
from the belief that the souPs fate is determined 
by predestination ages before it was born ; and can 
not a knowledge of the science of ethics, and of 
those universally recognized principles of honor, 
and justice, and equity, by which righteous men 
are governed, and by which, therefore, we may 
suppose that God is governed, help us to arbitrate 
between such hostile opinions, — perhaps to suggest 
a better faith ? 

And again, this very year is witnessing one of 
the most remarkable discussions that ever arrested 
the attention of the Christian world. An eminent 
professor* in an English university has promul- 
gated the opinion that, of all the heavenly bodies, — 
of all those stellar worlds that glorify the realms 
of space, — our tiny speck of earth is the only one 



* Supposed to be Dr. Whewell, of Trinity College, Cambridge, 
England, tbougli the book is anonymous. 



64 



DEMANDS OF THE AGE 



which is inhabited by rational and accountable 
beings. Though this globe, when compared with 
all the worlds around it, is not so much as a single 
leaf or blade of grass compared with all the vege- 
tation that beautifies its surface, and though an 
insect nestling in a flower might as well say that 
all the luxuriant fields and forests around him are 
a waste and a desert, and that he is the only object 
of his Maker's care, yet Dr. Whewell starts ofi" on 
his exterminating career through the universe, de- 
populating planets, and suns, and galaxies, sparing 
only this earth-monad on which we dwell. This 
theory has earned for him the unenviable nickname 
of the ^'Star-Smasher.'' But why this work of 
annihilation'? Why cover the -universe with this 
pall of darkness and death? I suppose for no 
other reason than to evade an objection to one of 
his interpretations of the Scriptures. If all worlds 
are inhabited by moral agents like ours, and all 
their races fell and became sinful like ours, and 
if Christ he a part of the Godhead^ and it be 
necessary for him to appear in each world in order 
to make the infinite atonement for sin which must 
precede the salvation of a single soul, then, as one 
infinity must be equal to another infinity, — that is, 
the infinity of worlds must be coequal with the 
infinity of duration, — it becomes mathematically de- 



ON COLLEGES. gg 

monstrable that it would take the Savior an eter- 
nity of time to go round the infinity of worlds, so 
that a portion of the worlds could never be reached 
by him in order to be redeemed, to say nothing of 
the sad delay necessarily accruing to the early- 
fallen but late-redeemed universes.* Hence a 
denial that there is any sufficient ground to sup- 
pose the existence of moral and rational beings 
throughout the stellar immensity, with the excep- 
tion of the very deplorable specimens which our 
earth has, in the main, hitherto exhibited ! Hence 
waste and desolation everywhere but here ; while 

* Without relying on the internal proof of the work itself, 
that Dr. Whewell was prompted and persuaded to make desola- 
tion of the whole universe except the earth, in order to avoid 
the objection above suggested to his theological scheme, I find, 
in a highly complimentary review of his essay in the September 
Number 1854, of Blackwood^ s Magazine, the following passage : 
" From beginning to end may be seen indications of a subtle 
and guarded logic, * * * and above and infinitely beyond 
all, a reverent regard for the truths of a revealed religion, and 
an earnest desire to advance its interests by removing what, in 
his opinion, many deem a serious stumbling-block in the way 
of the devout Christian. That stumbling-block may be seen 
indicated in the audacious language which we have quoted 
from Thomas Paine, [viz., 'that the system of a plurality of 
worlds renders the Christian faith at once little and ridicu- 
lous.'] If this be the object," continues the Reviewer, " which 
Dr. Whewell has had in view, and who can doubt it ?" etc., etCo 
p. 292. 

6 



QQ DEMANDS OF THE AGE 

here, as we all know, there is, to a vast extent, 
what is worse than waste and desolation. 
i Even if all the universes of stars could not 
be filled with rational, accountable, and immortal 
beings, to afford a theatre of vaster amplitude for 
the display of the power and goodness of God, could 
not some of them be so filled ? Must it all be bar- 
ren and inane ? And does not the bare statement 
of the case carry the idea that our heavenly Father 
found the creation of the race of Adam so unfor- 
tunate an experiment that he resolved never to try 
it again ? 

Every one will see how close to atheism this 
opinion of Dr. Whewell approaches. After abol- 
ishing the creative benevolence of God in all the 
rest of His empire, we have only to abolish it on 
this sand-grain of earth, and the universe is re- 
duced to a contemptible pageant; atheism reigns 
supreme over a morally void immensity ! Although 
the author of this opinion is learned, yet in this 
very work he has recorded his opinion that worldly 
knowledge ought not to be "mixed up" with mat- 
ters of religious faith. Here is the seminal prin- 
ciple of his giant birth of error. Hence, as it seems 
to me, he exhibits one of the most striking instan- 
ces on record where the sore eyes of theology have 
sought to extinguish all the light of the universe 



ON COLLEGES. g^ 

rather than cure its own diseased organs by the 
open remedy of natural vision. 

Not less disparaging to God's wisdom, though 
less destructive to his goodness, was the geologic 
theory, invented and put forth in 1839, — only fif- 
teen years ago, — by the Rev. Dr. Pye Smith, in 
order to reconcile the then common interpretation 
of the first chapter of Genesis with the demonstra- 
tions of geological science. Dr. Smith conceded so 
much to the science as to admit that our globe had 
existed for countless ages, and had been inhabited 
by various races of animals, before Adam was 
created ; but, for the sake of vindicating a literal 
interpretation of the Mosaic account of the crea- 
tion, — according to which sun, moon, stars, plants, 
animals, and man himself, v\^ere created not quite 
six thousand years ago, and all within the compass 
of six diurnal days, of twenty-four hours each, — he 
maintained that somewhere, perhaps in some cen- 
tral province of Asia, — no one knows its latitude or 
longitude, and no geography or geology has discov- 
ered any trace of it, — there was a spot, some '' ten 
miles square,'' like the District of Columbia, where, 
while all outside of it, in the other parts of the 
globe, " was life and light, there reigned for a time 
only death and darkness amid the welterings of a 
chaotic sea ; and which, at the divine command, 



gg DEMANDS OP THE AGE 

was penetrated by light, and occupied by dry land, 
and, ultimately, ere the end of the creative week, be- 
came a centre in which certain plants and animals, 
and finally man himself, were created.'' Now what 
a disgraceful instance is this of the tenacity with 
which theological preconceptions are held, in defi- 
ance of philosophical truth ! To suppose that while 
all the geological eras, one after another, were pass- 
ing through their immense cycles, and while all the 
rest of the earth was advancing to a state of prep- 
aration for the residence of man, a little "pre- 
serve" of chaos, somewhere, should be carefully 
fenced in and choicely kept, until six thousand 
years ago, when the work was there done in six days 
which it had elsewhere occupied countless ages to 
perfect; and that Moses knew all about this six 
days' work, but did not know about the other ; or, 
if he did know about it, kept his knowledge to 
himself ! How efficacious would be the union and 
cooperation of true religion and true science in 
preventing such records of shame from being in- 
scribed on the pages of history ! 

Everybody knows the efi*ect of continued inter- 
marriages among persons related by consanguinity. 
The cognate blood, unenriched and unstimulated 
from other fountains, soon breeds weakness, dis- 
ease, and imbecility. Just so it is with a sect that 



ON COLLEGES. gg 

shuts out truth because it was not embraced in the 
scheme of its founders. The ideas of such a sect 
have no alternative for their continued existence 
but to hreed in and in^ and this, by a psycholog- 
ical law as immutable as the physiological, soon 
begets a progeny of faith erroneous, absurd, imbe- 
cile, and idiotic. 

But how can we woo Religion to wed Science ? 
How can we reconcile Science, so long estranged, 
and now, I fear, more estranged than ever, to 
espouse Religion, and thus to accept the only bride- 
groom that is worthy of her queenly beauty and her 
magnificent dowry ? — nuptials at which the Son of 
God himself might rejoice to be present, and the 
splendor of whose celebration would compel those 
who live by the way-sides and hedges of error to 
come to the marriage feast. 

I answer, Science is not sectarian. It does not 
confine itself to any segment of the circle of philo- 
sophic truth, but seeks to embrace the entine cir- 
cumference. At the present day, a bigot in science 
can not live. Its pure empyrean air either exor- 
cises the demon of bigotry out of him, or sends him 
and it after the swine of the Gadarenes, to be 
choked in the sea of oblivion. Let any man at this 
time, in any scientific body or association in Chris- 
tendom, defend any dogma on the authority of his 



>^Q DEMANDS OF THE AGE 

government, or by any decree of old council, or as- 
sembly, or sanhedrim, against the facts of observa- 
tion and the results of experiment, and he is con- 
sidered as blaspheming against the " higher law,'' 
and his words accounted as " vain babbling.'' He 
can not be heard to set up theory against fact, au- 
thority against experience, or the tradition of a 
thousand years against the demonstration of yes- 
terday. The only religion, therefore, with which 
science will freely and rejoicingly consent to live 
and to work, is an unsectarian religion. Any other 
union is forced and unnatural, involving discord, 
dishonest compliances, and a suspension of progress 
in the pursuit of truth. In fine, any other union 
is not wedlock, but concubinage only. Science 
has no creed or articles of faith which a man must 
subscribe before he can be allowed to enroll his 
name as her follower, and to offer his acceptable 
contributions at her shrine. Science welcomes all 
new truth, all honest lovers of truth, and all honest 
inquirers after truth from whatever quarter they may 
come ; and the recommendation of her votaries is, 
not that they have attached themselves to the school 
of Werner or Hutton, of Newton or Laplace, hut 
that they have not. The great book of Nature is 
her Bible. Devoutly she believes in that. " 'Tis 
elder Scripture, writ by God's own hand," and she 



ON COLLEGES. ^1 

suffers no one to shut it up, in order that he may 
open in its stead some philosophy of the Dark 
Ages, or substitute for it some cosmogony of the 
heathen. And therefore science demands of re- 
ligion that she, too, shall love truth supremely ; 
not Talmuds, not acts of Parliament, or decrees 
of Councils or Synods; and that she shall subject 
the old interpretation to every new test which the 
continual evolution or unrolling of God's provi- 
dence shall supply. 

Science is the interpreter of Nature. It rev- 
erently inquires ; it listens to know ; it seeks ; it 
knocks to obtain communication ; and then all that 
it does is reverently to record nature's processes, 
and accept them as true. And it demands that 
religion shall proceed on similar exegetical prin- 
ciples. And therefore, when religion says she has 
a revelation from God, which revelation is record- 
ed in a book called the Bible, and that that book 
is therefore the very speech and utterance of God, 
and whenever read it is the same as though God 
himself were present and speaking its very words ; 
and when God thus rises to speak from his own 
book, whether in the family, in the school, or the 
church. Science proclaims that it is not only in- 
consistent, but impious, for any man or any body 
of men to rush forward and push Him, — Jehovah, — 



'^2 DEMANDS OF THE AGE 

aside, and tlien read some government-prepared or 
man-prepared articles, as containing a better an- 
nouncement of God's will, a superior exposition 
of His attributes than He, the all-wise, was him- 
self about to announce ; when, too, perhaps, the 
cardinal words of the substitute are nowhere to be 
found in the original ! How can science ever 
coalesce and co-operate with any such form of re- 
ligion as that, which repudiates its own chosen and 
sovereign authority, vetoes its acknowledged Law- 
giver, and forges a code of its own, which it at- 
tempts to pass off in the very presence, and to the 
very Being who, having issued the original, must 
know the counterfeit? Such science must shun 
the presence of such religion, whether in the same 
mind, in the same institution, or in the same com- 
munity. Neither in philosophic laboratory nor in 
Christian temple can they work together. What 
a wonderful fact it is, that almost continually since 
the Dark Ages as we with self-glorification call 
them, men have been striving to find Reason in 
heathen theologies, but to exclude it from Christian 
theology ! 

And furthermore, it is one of the cardinal ax- 
ioms of science at the present day, never to commit 
itself, on any doubtful or disputable question, by a 
set form of words. It deals in unqualified state- 



ON COLLEGES. 'j'g 

ment only in regard to the universally acknowl- 
edged ; but always uses hypotheses or subjunctives 
for what is questionable, or even gravely questioned. 
For, when any being less than omniscient binds him- 
self to verbal article or dogma, he thereby turns 
language, which should be his instrument, into 
an iron encasement for imprisoning his soul ; as 
though, having ceased to grow, its garments should 
be non-elastic with a close fit ; or, rather, as 
though, being dead, it were meet that it should 
be buried. Should a mind which has thus walled 
itself in by a form of words, strike by chance a 
new vein of truth, it may work that vein outward 
until it reaches the barrier set up by its own 
creed ; but at that point it must stop, and all truth 
lying beyond that point in that direction, though 
reaching outward to infinity, must be abandoned, 
because it conflicts, not with truth, for truth never 
conflicts with truth, but with what has been pre- 
judged to be true. He must turn back, there- 
fore, and relinquish it all. Again, perhaps, an 
earnest, investigating soul strikes another lode of 
truth, trending in another direction ; but soon the 
old barrier lies across its course, and again he 
must abandon all the treasures of discovery now 
lying within his grasp, and retire to poverty and 
darkness in the centre of his self-built dungeon. 



ijr^ DEMANDS OF THE AGE 

And SO, in whatever direction the love of truth 
and the freedom of thought may prompt explora- 
tion, the man who has tethered his mind by a form 
of words may go to the end of his line ; but all the 
glorious universe of truth which lies beyond, he 
must forego and deny. Hence every bigot, every 
man who binds himself by a form of words, inflicts 
upon himself a punishment like that which tyrants 
once inflicted upon rebels, whose bodies they sewed 
up in green hides and rolled out in the sun to dry, 
where the shrinking of the hide squeezed the vic- 
tim to death. What myriads of souls has bigotry 
thus squeezed to death ! 

On the monument of the elder Herschel, at 
Upton, it is inscribed, " codorum perrupit dans- 
tra f'^ he broke through the barriers of the skies ; — 
he transcended those boundaries with which former 
astronomers had, as it were, fenced in the heavens, 
and thus became the Columbus of the skies, ex- 
ploring oceans of space before untraversed, and 
revealing stellar systems before unknown. Had he 
and his followers kept themselves within the old 
creed, all the utilities, the wonders, and the glories 
of modern astronomy would now be a non-entity 
to man ! It is so of all truth ; emphatically so of 
those religious truths which are connected with 
science. 



ON COLLEGES. ^^ 

Now this self-inflicted imprisonment, this self- 
choking, is the very degradation and thraldom from 
which science, after centuries of struggle, has at 
last become emancipate, so that it now walks with 
Nature as Enoch walked with God. How, then, 
can it repudiate its glorious spiritual freedom, and 
voluntarily put fetters upon its limbs ? How can 
it coalesce and co-operate with any form of re- 
ligion that still hugs its chains ; that is ostenta- 
tious, even, of the wounds they have cut into its 
flesh, and would have its name articulated by their 
clanking? But science will love to form closest 
and most inseparable union with a religion that 
spurns all error, however time-hallowed, that as- 
pires after all truth, whatever Pharisee, or Saddu- 
cee, or high-priest may discover it. If any reli- 
ance can be placed upon all the analogies of nature, 
it can not be but that such science, joining hand 
and heart with such religion, will, by their com- 
bined, and therefore multiplied forces, enrich man- 
kind with grander discoveries, pour new light upon 
the heavenward path of duty, and supply stronger 
and nobler motives to live in obedience to the will 
of God. If I may use a former illustration for a 
new purpose, the Gospel of Jesus Christ will be 
the telescope bringing down the will of God from 
heaven and making one grand picture of that will 



»7g DEMANDS OF THE AGE ON COLLEGES. 

to be placed in the hands of all men upon earth ; 
and then each well-educated mind and pure heart 
"will be a microscope, whose lens, applied to that 
part of the picture which embraces one's own con- 
dition and relations, will so wonderfully magnify 
every object in it as to make the path of duty 
and of happiness radiant with both heavenly a,nd 
earthly light. Let Science and Religion, then, 
come together ; let them be united in holy banns, 
to be separated nevermore ; and may Antioch Col- 
lege perform her part of this glorious work ! 



77 



APPENDIX. 



ADDRESS OF THE PRESIDENT OF ANTIOCH COLLEGE 
TO ITS STUDENTS. 

My Young Friends, — My interest in your welfare, not only 
as present Students, but as future Men and Women, prompts me 
to solicit your candid attention to the following suggestions. 
They pertain to a subject upon which teachers and pupils ought 
always to be in unison, but where they usually are at variance. 

I avail myself of an early period in the history of our Insti- 
tution, to present these views, before a sentiment which has 
been so prevalent and so pernicious in older colleges, shall have 
obtained currency here. 

In Colleges and Schools, a sentiment very generally prevails 
that Students ought, as far as possible, to withhold all knowl- 
edge respecting the misconduct of their fellow- students from 
Faculty and Teachers. In many, if not in most cases, this sen- 
timent is enacted into what is called a Code of Honor. The 
requisitions of this code, in some places, are merely negative, 
demanding that a student shall take care to be absent when any 
wrong is to be committed, or silent when called upon as witness 
for its exposure. Sometimes it goes farther, and demands evasion, 
misrepresentation, or even falsehood, in order to screen a fellow- 
conspirator or a fellow- student from the consequences of his mis- 
conduct. Under this doctrine, any one who exposes a violator of 
college laws, or even an offender against the laws of morality 



78 APPENDIX. 

and religion, so that he may be checked in his vicious or crim- 
inal career, is stigmatized as an " informer," is treated with 
contempt and ridicule, and, not unfrequently, is visited with 
some form of wild and savage vengeance. 

It is impossible not to see that when such a sentiment becomes 
the " common law" of a literary institution, offenders will be 
freed from all salutary fear of detection and punishment. Where 
witnesses will not testify, or will testify falsely, of course the 
culprit escapes. This security from exposure becomes a premium 
on transgression. Lawlessness runs riot when the preventive 
police of virtuous sentiment and of allegiance to order is 
blinded and muzzled. Thus, at the very outset, this Code of 
Honor inaugurates the reign of dishonor and shame. Judged, 
then, by its fruits, what condemnation of such a code can be too 
severe ? 

But, in the outset, we desire to allow to this feeling, as we 
usually find it, all that it can possibly claim under any sem- 
blance of justice or generosity. When, as doubtless it some- 
times happens, one student reports the omissions or commissions 
of another to a College Faculty from motives of private ill-will 
or malice ; or, when one competitor in the race for college honors 
is convinced that he will be outstripped by his rival, unless he 
can fasten upon that rival some weight of suspicion or odium, 
and therefore seeks to disparage his character instead of sur- 
passing his scholarship ; or, when any mere tattling is done for 
any mean or low purpose whatever ;— in all such cases, every 
one must acknowledge that the conduct is reprehensible and 
the motive dishonoring. No student can gain any advantage 
with any honorable teacher by such a course. The existence of 
any such case supplies an occasion for admonition which no 
faithful teacher will fail to improve. Here, as in all other cases, 
we stand upon the axiomatic truth, that the moral quality of an 
action is determined by the motive that prompts it. 



APPENDIX. f^Q 

But suppose, on tlie other hand, that the opportunities of the 
diligent for study are destroyed by the disorderly, or that pub- 
lic or private property is wantonly sacrificed or destroyed by 
the maliciously mischievous; suppose that indignities and in- 
sults are heaped upon officers, upon fellow-students, or upon 
neighboring citizens ; suppose the laws of the land or the higher 
law of God is broken ; — in these cases, and in cases kindred to 
these, may a diligent and exemplary student, after finding that 
he can not arrest the delinquent by his own friendly counsel or 
remonstrance, go to the Faculty, give them information respect- 
ing the case, and cause the offender to be brought to an account ; 
or, if called before the Faculty as a witness, may he testify fully 
and frankly to all he knows? Or, in other words, when a 
young man, sent to college for the highest of all earthly pur- 
poses, — that of preparing himself for usefulness and honor, — 
is wasting time, health, and character, in wanton mischief, in 
dissipation, or in profligacy, is it dishonorable in a fellow- 
student to give information to the proper authorities, and thus 
set a new instrumentality in motion, with a fair chance of re- 
deeming the offender from ruin ? This is the question. Let us 
examine it. 

A college is a community. Like other communities, it has its 
objects, which are among the noblest; it has its laws indispen- 
sable for accomplishing those objects, and these laws, as usually 
framed, are salutary and impartial. The laws are for the ben- 
efit of the community to be governed by them ; and without 
the laws and without a general observance of them, this com- 
munity, like any other, would accomplish its ends imperfectly, — 
perhaps come to ruin. 

Now, in any civil community, what class of persons is it which 
arrays itself in opposition to wise and salutary laws .'' Of course, 
it never is the honest, the virtuous, the exemplary. They regard 
good laws as friends and protectors. But horse-thieves, coun- 



80 



APPENDIX. 



terfeiters, defrauders of the custom-lioTise or post-office, — ^these, 
in their several departments, league together, and form conspir- 
acies to commit crimes beforehand, and to protect each other 
from punishment afterwards. But honest farmers, faithful 
mechanics, upright merchants, the high-toned professional man, 
— these have no occasion for plots and perjuries ; for they have 
no offences to hide and no punishments to fear. The first aspect 
of the case, then, shows the paternity of this false idea of 
" Honor" among students. It was borrowed from rogues and 
knaves and peculators and scoundrels generally, and not from 
men of honor, rectitude, and purity. As it regards students, 
does not the analogy hold true to the letter ? 

When incendiaries, or burglars, or the meaner gangs of pick- 
pockets are abroad, is not he by whose vigilance and skill the 
perpetrators can be arrested and their depredations stopped, 
considered a public benefactor ? And if we had been the victim 
of arson, housebreaking, or pocket-picking, what should we 
think of a witness who, on being summoned into court, should 
refuse to give the testimony that would convict the offender ? 
Could we think any thing better of such a dumb witness than 
that he was an accomplice and sympathized with the villany ? 
To meet such cases, all our courts are invested with power to. 
deal with such contumacious witnesses in a summary manner. 
Refusing to testify, they are adjudged guilty of one of the 
grossest offences a man can commit, and they are forthwith im- 
prisoned, even without trial by jury. And no community could 
subsist for a month if every body, at his own pleasure, could 
refuse to give evidence in court. It is equally certain that no 
college could subsist, as a place for the growth of morality, and 
not for its extirpation, if its students should act, or were allowed 
to act, on the principle of giving or withholding testimony at 
their own option. The same principle, therefore, which justi- 
fies courts in cutting off recusant witnesses from society, would 



APPENDIX. gj 

seem to justify a College Faculty in cutting off recusant stu- 
dents from a college. 

Courts, also, are armed with power to punish perjury, and 
the law justly regards this offence as one of the greatest that 
can be committed. Following close after the offence of perjury 
in the courts, is the offence of prevarication or falsehood in 
shielding a fellow-student or accomplice from the consequences 
of his misconduct. For, as the moral growth keeps pace with 
the natural, there is infinite danger that the youth who tells 
falsehoods will grow into the man who commits perjuries. 

So a student who means to conceal the offence of a fellow- 
student, or to divert investigation from the right track, though 
he may not tell an absolute lie, yet is in a lying state of mind, 
than which many a sudden, unpremeditated lie, struck out by 
the force of a vehement temptation, is far less injurious to 
character. A lying state of mind in youth has its natural cul- 
mination in the falsehoods and perjuries of manhood. 

When students enter college, they not only continue their 
civil relations, as men, to the officers of the college, but they 
come under new and special obligations to them. Teachers as- 
sume much of the parental relation toward students, and students 
much of the filial relation toward teachers. A student, then, 
is bound to assist and defend a teacher as a parent, and a 
teacher is bound to assist and defend a student as a child. The 
true relation between a College Faculty and College Students 
is that which existed between Lord Nelson and his sailors : he 
did his uttermost for them and they did their uttermost for 
him. 

Now, suppose a student should see an incendiary, with torch 
in hand, ready to set fire to the dwelling in which any one of us 
and his family are lying in unconscious slumber, ought he not, 
as a man, to say nothing of his duty as a student, to give an 
alarm that we may arouse and escape ? Might we not put this 

6 



J 



32 APPENDIX. 

question to any body but tlie incendiary bimself, and expect an 
affirmative answer ? But if vices and crimes should become tho 
regular programme, the practical order of exercises, in a college, 
as they would to a great extent do, if the vicious and profligate 
could secure impunity through the falsehoods or the voluntary 
dumbness of fellow-students; then, surely, all that is most 
valuable and precious in a college would be destroyed, in the 
most deplorable way ; and who of us would not a hundred times 
rather have an incendiary set fire to his house, while he was 
asleep, than to bear the shame of the downfall of an institution 
under his charge, through the misconduct of its attendants? 
And, in the eyes of all right-minded men, it is a far lighter 
offence to destroy a mere material dwelling of wood or stone 
than to destroy that moral fabric, which is implied by the very 
name of an Educational Institution. 

The student who would inform me, if he saw a cut-purse 
purloining the money from my pocket, is bound by reasons still 
more cogent, to inform me if he sees any culprit or felon de- 
stroying that capital, that stock in trade, which consists in the 
fair name or reputation of the College over which I preside. 

And what is the true relation which the protecting student 
holds to the protected offender ? Is it that of a real friend, or 
that of the worst enemy ? An offender tempted onward by the 
hope of impunity, is almost certain to repeat his offence. If re- 
peated, it becomes habitual, and will be repeated not only with 
aggravation in character, but with rapidity of iteration ; un- 
less, indeed, it be abandoned for other offences of a higher type. 
A college life filled with the meannesses of clandestine arts ; 
first spotted, and then made black all over with omissions and 
commissions, spent in shameful escapes from duty, and in enter- 
prises of positive wrong still more shameful, is not likely to cul- 
minate in a replenished, dignified, and honorable manhood. 
Look for such wayward students, after twenty years, and you 



APPENDIX. 



83 



would not go to the high places of society to find them, but to 
the gaming-house, or prison, or some place of infamous resort ; 
or, if reformation has intervened, and an honorable life falsifies 
the auguries of a dishonorable youth, no where wiU you hear 
the voice of repentance and sorrow more sad, or more sincere, 
than from the lips of the moral wanderer himself. Now let me 
ask, what kind of a friend is he to another, who, when he sees 
him just entering on the high road to destruction, instead of 
summoning natural or official guardians to save him, refuses to 
give the alarm, and thus clears away all the obstacles, and sup- 
plies all the facilities for his speedy passage to ruin! 

K one student sees another just stepping into deceitful waters, 
where he will probably be drowned ; or proceeding along a path- 
way which has a pit-fall in its track, or a precipice at its end, 
is it not the impulse of friendship to shout his danger in his 
ear ? Or, if I am nearer than he, or can for any reason more 
probably rescue the imperilled from his danger, ought he not to 
shout to me ? But a student just entering the outer verge of 
the whirlpool of temptation, whose narrowing circle and accel- 
erating current will soon engulf him in the vortex of sin, is in 
direr peril than any danger of drowning, of pit-fall, or of prec- 
ipice ; because the spiritual life is more precious than the 
bodily. It is a small thing to die, but a great one to be de- 
praved. If a student will allow me to cooperate with him to 
save a fellow-student from death, why not from calamities which 
are worse than death ? He who saves one's character is a greater 
benefactor than he who saves his life. Who, then, is the true 
friend, he who supplies the immunity which a bad student de- 
sires, or the saving warning or coercion which he needs 7 

But young men are afraid of being ridiculed if they openly 
espouse the side of progress, and of good order as one of the es- 
sentials to progress. But which is the greater evil, the ridicule 
of the wicked, or the condemnation of the wise ? 



34: APPENDIX. 

"Ask you why Wharton broke through erery rule? 
^Twas all for fear that knaves would call him fooV* 

But tlie student says, Suppose I had been the wrong-doer, and 
my character and fortunes were in the hands of a fellow-student, 
I should not like to have him make report, or give evidence 
against me, and I must do as I would be done by. How short- 
sighted and one-sided is this view ! Suppose you had been made, 
or were about to be made, the innocent victim of wrong-doing, 
would you not then wish to have the past injustice redressed, or 
the future injustice averted ? Toward whom, then, should your 
Golden Eule be practised, — toward the offender, or toward the 
party offended ? Where a wrong is done, every body is injured, 
— the immediate object of the wrong, directly ; every body else, 
indirectly, — for every wrong invades the rights and the sense 
of safety which every individual, community, or body politic, 
has a right to enjoy. Therefore doing as we would be done by 
to the offender, in such a case, is doing as we would ?iot be done 
by to every body else. Nay, if we look beyond the present deed 
and the present hour, the kindest office we can perform for the 
offender, himself, is to expose, and thereby arrest him. With 
such arrest, there is great chance that he will be saved ; without 
it there is little. 

Does any one still insist upon certain supposed evils incident 
to the practice, should students give information of each other's 
misconduct ? We reply, that the practice itself would save nine- 
tenths of the occasions for informing, and thus the evils alleged 
to belong to the practice would be almost wholly prevented by it. 

But again ; look at the parties that constitute a College. A 
Faculty is selected from the community at large, for their sup- 
posed competency for teaching and training youth. Youth are 
committed to their care, to be taught and trained. The two 
parties are now together, face to face: — the one ready and 
anxious to impart and to mould ; the other in a receptive and 



APPENDIX. 



85 



growing condition. A case of offence, a case of moral delin- 
quency,— no matter what, — occurs. It is tlie very point, the 
very juncture, where the wisdom, the experience, the parental 
regard of the one, should be brought, with all their healing in- 
fluences, to bear upon the indiscretion, the rashness, or the 
wantonness of the other. The parties were brought into prox- 
imity for this identical purpose. Here is the casus fcederis. 
Why does not one of them supply the affectionate counsel, the 
preventive admonition, the heart- emanating and heart-penetrat- 
ing reproof; perhaps even the salutary fear, which the other so 
much needs; — needs now, needs to-day, needs at this very 
moment ; — needs as much as the fainting man needs a cordial, 
or a suffocating man air, or a drowning man a life-preserver .-* 
Why is not the anodyne, or the restorative, or the support given ? 
Skilful physician and desperate patient are close together. Why, 
then, at this most critical juncture, does not the living rescue 
the dying } Because a '^friend,'' a pretended " friend," holds 
it as a Point of Honor, that when his friend is sick, sick with a 
soul-disease, now curable, but in danger of soon becoming in- 
curable, he ought to cover up his malady, and keep the ethical 
healer bHnd and far away! When Cain said, "Am I my 
brother's keeper ?" it was a confession of his own crime. But 
even that crime, great as it was, fell short of encouraging Abel 
to do wrong, and then protecting the criminal that he might 
repeat his crime. 

" When we disavow 
Being keeper to our brother, we're hia Cain." 

Such is the whole philosophy of that miserable and wicked 
doctrine, that it is a Point of Honor not to " report," — though 
from the most humane and Christian motives, — the misconduct 
of a fellow-student to the Faculty that has legitimate jurisdic- 
tion over the case, and is bound by every obligation, of affection, 



gg APPENDIX. 

of honor, and of religion, to exercise that jurisdiction, with a 
single eye to the good of the offender and of the commnnity over 
which it presides. It is a foul doctrine. It is a doctrine 
which every parent ought to denounce wherever he hears it ad- 
vanced, — at his table, his fireside, or in public. It is a doctrine 
which every community of students ought, for their own peace, 
safety, and moral progress, to abolish. It is a doctrine which ' 
every College Faculty ought to banish from its halls ; — first by 
extracting it from its possessor, and expelling it alone ; or if 
tliat severance be impossible, by expelling the possessor with it. 

HOEAGE MANN 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 



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019 737 181 fi 



